


The Missing Star

by lordofsoup



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Original Avatar Character, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), SPACE!!, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), anyway if you like the vast and vast avatars pls read this so we can enjoy together!, i am obsessed with the daedalus space station i s2g, i fucking love the vast so much, non binary character, pinniacle aerospace, the vast, this is fairly tame tbh, tw for isolation and some vauge references to violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:16:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27499297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lordofsoup/pseuds/lordofsoup
Summary: Statement of Dr. Nikita Semeyonov, regarding a missing star. Original statement given September 3rd, 1997. Audio Recording by Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	The Missing Star

**Author's Note:**

> hey everyone super excited to finally post the statement for my oc Dr. Semeyonov. Just FYI they are non binary and use they/them pronouns. I know it might not be clear from the statement so I thought I'd mention it. Anyway i really hope you enjoy this I know ocs arent usually very popular so I'd appreciate if you left a comment! Thanks so much! Love you!

**Archivist**   
  
Statement of Dr. Nikita Semeyonov, regarding a missing star. Original statement given September 3rd, 1997. Audio Recording by Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.  Statement begins,    
  
**Archivist (Statement)**   
  
You don’t know anything about the world you live in. 

Don’t believe me? Look up at the night sky.    
  
And when I say night sky, I mean a proper night sky. Not that overcast nonsense that passes for a nigh sky for inner-city dwellers, where the stars are more reminiscent of holes stabbed into the lid of a bugs enclosure by an over-eager child.   
  
I mean the night sky as it was meant to be seen. Alone and far away from civilization you will bare witness to a sky so foreign, suddenly the world you live in will seem unfamiliar and strange.   
  
I myself, am well acquainted with this feeling. I’m an astronomer. As such my job description requires the formation of a rather contradictory worldview. One in which things I cannot truly understand must be understood through numbers and theory and chalk. The illusionary practice of taking larger than life concepts and reducing them to mere equations. A futile practice. Words and numbers alike convey little meaning and in the end, they do not deepen our understanding.   
  
I don’t mean to sound down- I love my job. Probably too much. Hence my current state.    
  
Even in university back in Moscow, I was a workaholic. I had a hard time making friends. Whenever someone managed to pull me away long enough to attend some party or event they would usually abandon me by the middle of the night as it became clear I wouldn’t let up on the shop talk.    
  
Ah, the shame that would overcome me as I finished my drink and slipped out unnoticed into the fresh night.    
  
But, hard work pays off and I found myself one of the few researchers lucky enough to have access to the Pushchino Astronomy Observatory, one of the first observatories of its kind. Never heard of it? Good. Astronomers like their privacy. 

I was very excited to take this job. Nothing but me and clear skies above. The dawning of a bright new age of space exploration. And I was leading the charge.    
  
I make it sound glamorous- it really wasn’t. I worked below the telescope and my job mainly consisted of analyzing data picked up by our instruments. Rather tedious work but math is often tedious so I didn’t mind.    
  
My favorite days were when the telescope would be set to take deep space imaging. Nowadays most of our deep space images come from satellites but you can still get some interesting data and fascinating pictures of space from ground observatories.   
  
It was on one of those nights when the incident occurred.    
  
Typically the engineers are the only ones in the observatory that late as they maned the telescope. But, as I mentioned, I am a workaholic so it was only natural I’d find myself in the observation deck in the wee hours of the morning.    
  
After the scope was set and the imaging process had begun I decided to step outside for a little break.    
  
It was a cold March night. A common occurrence in the Russian countryside. The observatory was located atop a steep hill that overlooked a valley of dark wilds. The small white puff of my breath was the only disturbance of the frozen air.    
  
I leaned against the railing and fished a loose cigar out of my lab coat. Lighting it, I looked idly into the night sky.    
  
I may have had access to state of the art astronomical equipment but there is always something to be said for pure naked eye observation. After all, that is how heavenly observation was done for centuries.    
  
The sky I looked into was the same one my ancestors looked into. I wonder if they felt as small as I did? Or did their ignorance of the void’s true nature prevent them from ever seeing the sky as I did?   
  
Two different peoples, across two different times, looking at the same sky and seeing a million different things.    
  
But still, I trace the same shapes they once did.   
  
How ridiculous our lives are.   
  
The night was freezing and I held my cigar close to my body to ward off the chill as it slowly seeped into my bones. I took a moment to pay extra attention to the dimmer stars, the ones that were only visible in the most remote of locations, so people who never left the comfort of civilization would never get a chance to see them shine. 

The dim stars peeked out from the velvet curtain of night, winking down at me like I was privy to some secret.    
  
One of those stars was v446 Herculis, a star located in the constellation of Hercules. The star was dim but not so dim that I had trouble finding it. I contemplated this pinprick of light among a sea of hundreds of thousand brighter and more interesting. Something about the star seemed….off. It seemed to, flare slightly, in its perch. Not twinkle, the twinkling effect is actually caused by the atmosphere's effect on light, this was not that. The star...pulsed. It’s light climbed intensely and then returned to its original magnitude. It was completely unlike anything I had seen a star do in my lifetime. I craned my neck towards it curiously. My cigar tumbled from my limp grasp and disappeared into the darkness beneath. I became mesmerized by this formerly innocuous fixture of the sky as it continued its strange dance.   
  
I thought about how light travels.    
  
Do you know how far a lightyear is?    
  
You might, depending on your educational background, know, theoretically, that a lightyear is equal to around 9,500,000,000,000 kilometers.    
  
But do you actually know how far 9,500,000,000,000 kilometers is?    
  
Can you comprehend that distance? Can you picture it in your mind?    
  
How about 2,100 lightyears? That’s how far away v446 Herculis was at the moment.    
  
Can you hold that knowledge in your mind?    
  
Is it even possible to conceptualize it?    
  
I stared up as the light continued its erratic movement when I realized- it was not pulsing...it was reaching.    
  
The star was reaching, thousands of lightyears away and it reached. Across space and time, its light reached towards me.    
  
It was so close now. I could touch it. If I tried.    
  
I stood on my tiptoes and felt my fingertips brush against the edge of the light. Filled with vigor I hopped up slightly to try and reach this tantalizing pinprick of light.    
  
My hand closed around the star just as I lost my balance and went head first over the railing.    
  
But I did not fall.

  
As I snatched v446 Herculis from its place in the sky, gravity left me and I tumbled forward into the impossibly night sky. My sense of direction scrambled and my insides lurched uncomfortably as I caught a glimpse of the ground below me, and where the dark shadow of the valley should have been there was instead more sky. I found myself floating, aimlessly, through a sea of stars and cold, empty, void.    
  
My mouth opened and closed uselessly. The echo of an instinctual scream never brought to completion. My body flailed and the motion carried me further into this impossible space.    
  
My hands were cupped close to my chest and as I opened them and saw a bright glowing ember, twinkling between my cupped palms.    
  
V446 Herculis. A star in my grasp. Plucked from its ineffable perch to sit in my palm. 

  
This bead of light. This impossible piece of the sky I so lovingly tracked and now held in my hands.    
  
It seemed so small when compared to the sheer size of the abyss I found myself cast adrift in. I tried to scream or cry but my lungs did not seem to work. I soon realized that any attempt at sound would be useless as there was nothing that could possibly hear me. The stars mocked me with their silence. Titans of light that hide from me in the void.   
  
Do you know how large a star is?   
  
I’ll give you a hint- one solar mass is equal to around 1.989e+27 metric tons.

Can you visualize that number? Can you hold it in your mind? Can you even accurately conceptualize the size of one metric ton? Let alone 1.989e+27?    
  
Can you hold it in your mind? Can you hold it in your hand?    
  
Of course, you can’t.   
  
But I did.    
  
I must have floated there for…...days? Weeks? Years? I can’t say. I think I would have been perfectly content to spend the rest of my seemingly unnatural life in that void. Clutching the star in my grasp. Adrift in a universe that I did not understand and that did not understand me. An existence which made painfully obvious my place as impermanent and insignificant.    
  
I began to appreciate the void's honesty.    
  
I can’t say when, or why, but eventually, staring into that flicker of light that sat in my grasp, something occurred to me.    
  
With no clear motive, I curled my hand closed around it. The light still shone brightly, peeking out from the space between my fingers. I clutched my fist tighter and the light began to dim. It blinked slowly in and out of existence. For a long moment, I kept my fist clenched; my nails bit into my skin and grounded me as I extinguished the light.   
  
A moment that could have been an eternity passed, I unfurled my hand and found nothing there. Was there ever anything there? I couldn’t say. I remained suspended in this limbo. 

  
The stars went silent. I noticed their light began to pulse in a similar manner to Herculis. It flared erratically, the brightness would crescendo and engulf my vision before retreating once more into darkness. The flashing intensified and grew quicker until the shining light burned it’s way deep into my mind. Suddenly, as the light reached further into my being, I felt gravity return to me. I began to careen towards an unseen ground at an unnatural velocity.   
  
As I fell I noticed something.   
  
The stars had disappeared.   
  
No light penetrated the inky blackness of the void that I fell through. The velocity forced the air out of my lungs and the featureless darkness gave me nothing with which to orient myself.  
  
I fell for a long time. Not as long as my previous limbo but it was quite a bit.   
  
I did not seem to be nearing any ground. My perpetual state of falling was apparently to be just as infinite. Except now there were no stars to keep me company in my terror.   
  
I must have hit the ground at some point. Or maybe I didn’t. Perhaps I am still falling through that void and my presence here in your office is nothing but an elaborate fantasy invented by my degrading mind to cope with them seeming infinity I was forced to bare witness to.   
  
Probably not, but possibly.   
  
Either way, I have memories of waking up, half-buried in a snow bank on the hillside by the observatory.   
  
My eyes snapped open and I was greeted with a sky that was all at once exceedingly familiar and utterly alien.   
  
In an attempt to validate my previous experience I sought out the strange star that had taken me.   
  
V446 Herculis, utterly gone from its place in the sky. I stared up at the area it was supposed to be and found nothing but void.   
  
I laughed... I laughed and laughed and laughed. The previous terror leeched out of my body and replaced with a sense of absurd joy.   
  
I laughed even harder as the observatory perched atop its hilltop ledge, cascaded down the cliffside.   
  
And that is my story. As for why I decided to tell you this today well, I will be taking a trip soon, in a rather ambitious extraterrestrial adventure, and this is my farewell gift to you. I hope you found it pleasant.   
  
Don’t wait up.   
  
  
**Archivist** **  
** Statement ends. **  
****  
** Well, another older statement but an interesting one. We did some follow-ups on the names mentioned and this is what we found.   
  
Dr. Nikita Semeyonov was a Russian astronomer in the early 1960s. There was a Pushchino Astronomy Observatory and it did suffer a massive structural collapse in March of 1960.   
  
There were a number of casualties. Among those listed; Dr. Nikita Semeyonov.  
  
As for the star mentioned, v446 Herculis, I could only find one source on its existence. A scientific report dating to around the same time as the collapse. The report was in Russian and while I had it translated it did not help much as the majority of the report is rather dense with scientific nomenclature.   
  
I did manage to discern that the star in question did apparently go supernova in March of 1960, as specified in this Dr. Semeyonov’s statement. And it’s subsequent death was only noted as “unusually quick.” No other documentation on the star exists.   
  
Given that the statement was given in 1997 it is possible that the “extraterrestrial adventure” referenced was the launch of the international space station in the following year, 1998. I had Sasha check the records of those involved in the ISS’s mission for Dr. Nikita Semeyonov and she reported no records of Dr. Semeyonov ever being involved with the international space station.   
  
Given the evidence, I am confident in claiming that Dr. Semeyonov died in a terrible accident in 1960, and the claims made in this statement as nothing more than the product of a far-fetched imagination.   



End file.
